How Moses Came to Me

From Thanksgiving through Christmas, I felt a great unraveling of all the healing and working that the Lord had done in my heart over the last year and a half. The strength, the intimacy with God, the understanding and acceptance of my life’s circumstances all lost their leaves, dried up and froze as winter progressed. I don’t know how this happened or why. Much of the anger, confusion, frustration, impatience and unbearable longing that were birthed out of Jon and I not having children took up residence once again and I was brought to a very low place.

I had many good days during the holidays; time with family and friends and time preparing to celebrate Christmas. These days however were tainted with moments of deep despair, of pain that I hadn’t felt in months, and an inexplicable feeling that I was being slowly dragged down back into my pit, a pit that had become my home for too long, a pit I did not want to return to but to which I was undeniably heading.

Throughout this time I was spending many hours pouring over the book of Exodus because our small groups in InterVarsity were going to be studying the life of Moses and I had to choose and prepare all of the scripture we would be using. I was also teaching at our first large group of the semester on Exodus Chapter 3. My talk intended to look at God’s character in Exodus as a foundation for us before we jumped into studying Moses. In this particular chapter God is sharing with Moses that He has seen the suffering of the Israelites, He has heard their cry, and He has come to send Moses to deliver them from that place. He says that He is concerned for them.

After reading and studying and praying over this passage God led me into a time of prayer that was one of the more desperate prayers of my life. Desperate in that I felt I was at the bottom of the pit, that I honestly couldn’t go on, that even though I knew how to deal with dark emotions and I knew that I shouldn’t be feeling this way, it didn’t matter. I just felt desperate. There was no shame in that moment in feeling like I was being childish or impatient, no shame in knowing that I should just be content. I just felt desperate.

And I prayed from that place.

I prayed that just as God had sent Moses to the Isrealites in response to their suffering, their crying out, and above all His deep love and concern for them. Just as He intervened on their behalf by sending them this mere human, I prayed that He would also send Jon and I a baby to deliver me from this place. I knew I should be praying for patience and God’s will and asking for forgiveness for being so obsessed with something, but I didn’t care and that is not where my prayer was coming from. I prayed for our own Moses. Not because I deserved a baby, not because I had behaved so well (because I certainly haven’t!). But because He loved me and was concerned for me.

A week later Jon and I got a positive pregnancy test.

Now there is the part of me that says this isn’t anything special. I was on progesterone which was obviously working. We were charting my cycle and “doing” all the right things. But the power, the significance, and the Spiritual guidance I felt in praying that prayer trumped all of those facts.

God answered that prayer. He heard my crying and saw my suffering and sent a mere human to me. A human that is now 3 months gestational and has a strong heartbeat. A human that I will hopefully get to hold in my arms in September, as I have so longed for.

Here is a picture from our 8 week ultrasound:
We also heard the hearbeat at 11 weeks and our next appointment is at the end of March.